Side Tracks

Outside of the ridiculousness of Great Northern Audio Jerry Stearns and Brian Price have worked independently in practically every capacity of audio theater—from writing and digital editing to producing, directing and SFX to sound design and engineering for a pile of professional and amateur radio theater groups and artists. We’re proud of this work and encourage you to check out more about some our favorite audio theater friends and colleagues. Also listed below are some works from the Archives of the Great Northern Audio Theatre. Sought-after works from our past that are only available here.

• Sound Affects: A Radio Playground

Audio theater, comedy and the audio arts.

Jerry has been hosting the Sound Affectsbroadcast on Community Radio KFAI since 1994. It's a showcase of modern audio theater from all over the world. I will play Old Time Radio on occasion for historical reference, but mostly I'm offering the new material that is being made today, or at least since network radio drama ceased.

These are the great people at Good Old Boatsailing magazine. They've published several audiobooks about sailing, and we've had a good time getting to work on some of them.

There are samples to listen to. Try Sailing Around The World, Captain Joshua Slocum's tale of his solo circumnavigation. Or Jule Miller's A Voyage Toward Vengeance, a suspenseful thriller in the Caribbean.

Shockwave

For 13 years, Jerry and Dave Romm and Brian Westley hosted Shockwave on community radio station KFAI-FM in Minneapolis/ St. Paul. During that time, from 1979 through 1993, they produced a large catalog of very silly original science fiction and fantasy works with help from a large and active Fannish community, including especially Kara Dalkey. Here are a few pieces from the Shockwave shows performed at Minicon, a Twin Cities regional science fiction convention, or done in the studio. You can find more Shockwave audio, and the show’s continuity between 1994 and 2007, under Dave Romm and Brian Westley, at www.romm.org.

(RIGHT: Poster by Ken Fletcher. ) –>

The Pirate Sketch - was part of a longer work titled, "Generic Movies", in which the characters and story went on, but the genre of the movie changed periodically. This is, naturally, the Pirate Movie portion. (3:39 minutes)

Night of the Cooters, a Howard Waldrop short story, adapted with permission of the author for the 1992 Shockwave Minicon show. It's a War of the Worlds as it might have happened in Texas. (Live. 29 m)

Vince Washburn, the New Age Detective. The first script, "Penalty For Early Death," won the MRTW script contest in 1988. We performed it in 1987 at a Shockwave Minicon show. The second episode, "If You've Got the Time," was part of the first show we ever did with David Ossman, called Coming Soon To A Galaxy Near You, at Minicon 31. Both brought to us by Astral Travel. (VW 1 is 22 minutes. VW 2 is 25 minutes.)

Shockwave at the GigaMall. A fairly typical show with some script and plenty of improvisation (with the music removed) by Jerry, Dave Romm, Kara Dalkey, Brian Westley and Doug Friauf. We travel to the St. Paul Spaceport’s new immeasurably huge GigaMall (“A thousand times bigger than the MegaMall and Twice the Fun.”). (16 minutes.)

In Memory of Dave Romm. Baron Dave passed away in September of 2017. This is a Sound Affects (10/1/2017) show we did in tribute to the boundless creativity of Dave. Especially take note of The Possible Dream, one of Dave’s best playing-with-language pieces. (One hour.)

Spindizzy. A collection of silly sci-fi sketches originally published on one of those floppy records you used to find in magazines. (19 minutes, 24 MB). Includes Preconceptions: News of the Future and Captain Audio and the Space Cassettes. Full of science fiction references. The title is from James Blish’s Cities In Flight novels. Cover art by Kara Dalkey. Find more artwork and complete credits on DavE Romm’s Shockwave Facebook page.

Star of Vengeance

This is a ten-part serial written by Andre Guirard, and produced by Jerry for the Shockwave radio show. We include here in MP3 format all ten episodes for you.

• Fearless Comedy Productions

Big Fun Radio Funtime!A periodic production by Tim Wick, one of our regular players in the Mark Time Radio Shows. We are pleased to be able to contribute to Fearless Comedy Productions on occasion. Here are some of the pieces we wrote.

• The Iowa Radio Project

Back in the early 1990's we worked for Dan Coffey's Iowa Radio Project. When Dan wasn't being Dr. Science, he produced and taught radio at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. We don't know where Dan got the goofy postcards he used to market the series, but they were certainly appropriate.

Brian,as a sort of staff writer, wrote 15 Iowans Abroad episodes. Here are the first three, and his favorites. "The idea was to do a 30-minute TV sitcom in 5 minutes. We got it down to 4 minutes. It was loads of fun and Dan got to use all his goofy accents."

Narrowed Horizons

Back in 1985 Brian moved to Columbia, Missouri. He wandered by the Donald Duck church and found KOPN Community radio. Teaming up with writer/comedian, Delton T. Horn, he helped produce a live weekly half-hour radio show of sketch comedy for six months and then they finished out a very productive two years with 30 episodes of Narrowed Horizons. Narrowed Horizons tells the story of Delton and Dwayne and their world tour which insanely stumbled from their driveway to a personality seminar to an attack by girl scouts. Produced on 4-track cassette, it still sounds pretty good today.

SoundStories

An audio theater troupe in Minneapolis/St. Paul for two years or so. One of their productions won a Mark Time Award for science fiction audio in 1999. 407 Arachne was written by Brian d'Eon, directed by Jennifer Arave, and produced by Jerry Stearns.

Another SoundStories, piece produced and directed by the late Dick Stevens, is the horror story Blood Night, written by Lon Ryden. It's a traditional kind of suspense story, taking place at a remote resort, with young lovers, ulterior motives and a tragic history.

MRTW

Brian and Jerry each had a work produced at the Midwest Radio Theater Workshop, operating out of KOPN community radio in Columbia, MO. It was the predecessor of the National Audio Theatre Festivals annual workshop. Both of them have worked as staff at the workshops a few times.

The Reign of Doug - Brian's play about old friends dropping by to haunt you. Produced at MRTW in 1992, and directed by Skip Pizzi. (27 minutes)

Vince Washburn: New Age Detective - Jerry's detective seems to get the cases that feature all that NewAge stuff, like past-life regressions, mantras and organic gurus. And all the characters' names seem familiar if you look carefully at a street map of Minneapolis. Directed by Skip Pizzi at the MRTW in 1988. (22 minutes)

The Best of MRTW Education Tapes Series

Produced by Brian Price. Taken from workshop sessions at ten Midwest Radio Theater Workshops. Topics include Writing for Radio, Director as Producer: Getting Organized, Directing: Working With Actors, Acting for Radio, Voices and Accents, and Musical Integration. An excellent resource for anyone wanting to learn more about the crafts of audio drama. Each tape is about an hour long.

The Grist Mill

The Grist Mill is a horror audio production house out of Lowell, MA, headed up by Scott Hickey. One of their recent releases is God of the Razor, a terrific horror story by Joe R. Lansdale. He's a familiar character in Lansdale stories. Script adaptation by Jerry Stearns, direction and post production by Brian Price, with music by Mike Wheaton.

Also includes Mort Castle's If You Take My Hand, My Son.

Another to look for is Slasher, adapted and directed by Brian from a story by F. Paul Wilson.

Scripts and Services

Several of our scripts have been produced by other groups. See more on the Scripts and Services page.

And we offer audio theater services of various kinds. See our About Us page for details on what we have in the way of experience.

In Print

The Dakota Reader

Brian Price produced The Dakota Reader, a series of performances through the South Dakota Institute of Art in Brookings. They included a variety of presentations, including local poets and musicians, audio theater, and presentations on aspects of audio arts. We may have a few CDs of these still around: Jerry Stearns' treatise, "The Best Aliens Are the Ones Only You Can See: A History of Science Fiction on Radio, 1930 to 2001", and Rev. Dwight Frizzell's "From Ark to Microchip: A History of Audio Art, 10,000 BC - 2010."

Audio Theater Conferences

TC Radio Theater Workshop

In 1997 Jerry and Brian organized the Twin Cities Radio Theatre Workshop, meant to be a live persentation of audio theater written by local writers and performed by local actors. It was open to the public in the Rarig Center Theater on the University of Minnesota campus, and broadcast live on KFAI-FM and KUOM-AM at the University. The first half was Tirebiter's Follies, an original variety hour by David Ossman, of the Firesign Theatre. The second hour, the only part that was broadcast, consisted of five short pieces. Here are the original works from that broadcast.

Independent Producers' Conference

In October of 2004 Jerry, Brian and Kris Markman assembled the Twin Cities Independent Audio Theater Producers' Conference in Minneapolis, hoping to help producers talk to each other and exchange ideas and create a community of audio theater makers. Thirty people attended from around the country.

The Keynote speech at the Conference, was by Judith Walcutt and David Ossman, of Otherworld Media. A history of audio theater in America over the last 30 years of the 20th Century, through the exploits of one independent audio theater production team. Great Northern Audio hosted the conference.

Reviews

Brian writes reviews for Audiofile magazine of audio theater and audiobooks. Some of them he records for their reviews podcast. Hear his review of Frank Herbert's "Dune," and one of Jack Finney's "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." He also writes a column called The Echo of One Hand Clapping for AudiobooksDJ, a website about all aspects of new audiobooks. The column is some notes on audio publishing and production.

Others we have worked with

The Firesign Theatre - several of our pieces feature the voice talents of David Ossman, Philip Proctor, and Melinda Peterson. Here's a sample of the process of FST, a rehearsal from the Hellos and Goodbyes section at the end of the Give Me Immortality or Give Me Death album. (with permission of FST)